Best part of gardening is sharing

September 26, 2009

By Karl Terry: PNT columnist

Linus of Peanuts fame would be proud. “The Great Pumpkin” hasn’t descended on my garden but “The Great Zucchini” has arrived.

I’m not sure how a person can carefully search a garden each morning for squash and cucumbers that are just the right size for tenderness, then out of the blue suddenly one day you see one right there in plain sight that’s about the size of a ripe watermelon. Strike that, my watermelons aren’t going to ever grow anywhere near as big as this monster vegetable.

This overgrown zuke, which measures approximately 20 inches long and still weighs 6 pounds a couple of weeks after I picked it would be a prize if I had been trying to see how big I could grow one. But I was trying not to let them get over 8 inches long.

The dilemma is what to do with the infant sized squash. It’s going to have seeds the size of quarters and probably won’t be too tender.

We’ve thought about making a squash boat stuffed with meat, cheese and spices. We’ve also considered grating the meat of the squash to use for zucchini bread. So far it’s just been sitting on the kitchen counter where we can marvel at it.